


Aftermath

by petrichorstarlight (goldkirk)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, Kidnapping, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-03 22:39:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2890592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldkirk/pseuds/petrichorstarlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you aren't the same person anymore, when you've been through something like that...how do you pick up the pieces of your old life? How do you go back to the way you were? </p>
<p>How do you rebuild your life from the debris when everything you were has been ripped away?</p>
<p>(Modern high school/college AU, where they live in a city and deal with a string of kidnappings. The POV alternates between Mina and Armin with each chapter. Lots of shipping can be done, but it's not the main focus of this fic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ClosetTherapist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClosetTherapist/gifts).



It was a Saturday night when Marco vanished, and no one realized it until the next day. There was panic and searching, but all in all it was a normal missing persons case. Tragic, but ordinary.

But then two other Rose High School students vanished—Sasha and Connie. And another teen, from Sina University—Nanaba. Three friends were gone without a trace. People got more worried and cautious. Everyone hoped that with the police searching day and night, along with groups of volunteers, the kidnappings would stop. But they were wrong—it only got worse from there.

 

* * *

 

_**Tuesday, Seven Days Before** _

Marco was still missing. Their school, Rose High, had an assembly the Monday after he vanished, talking about the situation and telling us ways of dealing with it. There was some free counseling for people who wanted it, and those who knew Marco tried to do what they could to help the search. Flyers and door-to-door questioning can only do so much, though, and the others had schoolwork and activities to keep up with. His friends didn't forget about Marco or stop worrying, but they couldn't spend our entire days focused on his disappearance.

It was a rather uneventful day. Tuesdays usually were, for Mina. School was fine, though far less cheerful than usual. Without Marco to be freckled sunshine and goodwill towards all men, things felt dull and faded. As the usual group sat at their lunch table, discussion revolved mainly around Marco and how things had changed. 

"Jean's still not back," Mikasa said. "I understand him not coming yesterday, but today too?"

"Lay off him, Mikasa," Eren shot back. "He's having a hard time dealing with everything."

"We all love Marco, and what's happened is awful. But I don't see any of us missing school because of it."

"Marco is Jean's best friend, not ours," Mina interjected. "Jeans' going to have a way harder time than any of us. They've known each other since they were eight. They're inseperable. It's probably like losing a limb. Or would that be more like half a brain...?"

"Wouldn't it be better for Jean to be at school though, where everyone will keep him distracted and he'd be busy with his work?" Mikasa asked.

Armin looked up from his AP World History homework. "I went to his house yesterday to check on him. He was a wreck. I doubt Jean wants to be around anyone right now."

"I thought you said his mom told you he didn't want to see anyone," Mina said.

"I could hear him crying."

They were all quiet. Jean tried to be so tough and in charge all the time, but Marco saw right through that. He'd helped the others see the caring, sensitive heart Jean tried to hide behind a layer of bravado and snark—but sometimes Jean wasn't strong enough to keep it hidden. Losing Marco like this, without knowing anything about what happened, must have been unbearable for Jean, who cared about his friends to a fault.

"Let's go over it one more time," Eren said, eliciting a groan from the rest of the table. Sasha and Connie picked that moment to plop down and join us. They were a little late because the yearbook committee they were on had had a make-up meeting during the first half of the lunch period that day.

"Go over what one more time?" Connie asked.

"How Marco went missing."

Sasha started digging into the cafeteria tray as Armin objected. "Eren, we've  _already_ gone over it too many times to count. It's not going to help us unless we have new information to add to the discussion."

"You never know! Maybe one of us will remember something that we didn't notice before."

Armin sighed. There was really no stopping Eren once he got determined to do something. "All right, fine... Sasha, Connie, you remember the info Officer Hannes gave us after the assembly, right?" 

They nodded. 

"The officials gave us pretty much nothing," Mina grumbled. "They also barely said anything about Marco himself. Just that he was a fellow student of ours and was assumed to have been kidnapped, since he wasn't anywhere near places he could get lost and he wasn't the type to run away. But nothing about how he brought together so many people. Nothing about how kind and selfless he is. Nothing about how he loves classic rock and makes amazing art and wants to take flying lessons so he can work in supplies transportation for the Red Cross. Nothing important. Nothing about  _him._ " 

"It's true," Sasha said. "It's like they didn't actually care about Marco, or about what happened. It was just a bunch of lecturing about safety and how the school was going to be taking precautionary measures during operational hours. Which I get, because they don't want anyone else vanishing, but they could really have done it better. Marco is missing. It's not going to be fixed by a one-time safety seminar."

"He's such a big figure here. He's involved in everything. I don't think I've met a single person who doesn't love Marco...he just really cares about everyone," Armin said, looking down. "And they tell us he's missing and then expect us to just be okay with having no information about what happened? Did they think we wouldn't want to know?" He shook his head. "At least Hannes was willing to talk with us afterwards."

"He is," Eren said. "So he said that the last time anyone saw Marco was after basketball practice, right?"

"Right," Mikasa said. "Jean and Thomas both offered him rides, but he turned them down because he wanted to walk home since it was nice. It wasn't dark yet, so they didn't think there would be any problem with him doing that."

"It definitely was nice. I don't blame him for wanting to take advantage of the weather. We were all just talking that morning about how it was probably the last nice day we would have for a while since the cold front was coming." Eren tapped the table. "And then he started down Trost Street, and...are we sure no one saw him after that?"

"None of the shop owners or tenants along the street front remember seeing him. One person's kid said he might have noticed Marco, right before he walked past Café Marie. But he said he wasn't sure." Mina took a long drink from her water bottle.

"Okay, well, let's just assume that the kid did see him. So he made it at least halfway home. Did anyone talk with Marie yet? I can't believe she wouldn't have seen him. She notices everything that goes on around her store."

"I did, but she wasn't working that day. It was Nile, and you know how he has a laser focus on serving the customers. He doesn't pay attention to anything else."

"But—" Eren was stopped by the five minute warning bell. Everyone grabbed their things and headed to lockers, classes, locker rooms—whatever they had to do for the next period. "We'll pick this up again after school!" Eren yelled as he started for the science lab. 

Armin and Mina walked together to their AP Studio Art Class.

"He's really fixed on going over the facts and figuring this out," Mina muttered, shifting her backpack strap around.

"It's how he is," Armin sighed. "When Eren is feeling helpless, he digs his feet in and stubbornly refuses to give up. It's not necessarily helping anything, but it's keeping him from losing it. And I don't know, I feel like it kind of helps me too. It gives us something to focus on instead of feeling useless and angry about things we can't change."

"Yeah," Mina said. "It's just...he's not giving us a chance to stop and think. It's great that this is helping him, but some of us need to process everything in different ways. I haven't had a chance to just sit down and deal with it. I need to process it myself. Marco is important to me, to all of us. Him being missing is a huge, gaping hole. I was helping him with that Psychology project. I babysit his siblings. He keeps us sane during Spanish. Eren might deal with it by giving himself a different focus, but I need to focus for a while on what's going on right now and not what I want to happen."

"So tell him. When he texts you asking you to meet with all of us at his house tonight, tell him no. Say you have some other things you have to get done. He doesn't have a monopoly on your time, you know."

"I...okay. I feel kind of bad about it, because I know he's only trying to help things, but...yeah, I think you're right. I need to take my own time tonight. Will you go, if I don't?"

Armin shrugged. "He's my best friend. Of course I will. Maybe I can make him talk about it and face what's going on instead of busying himself out. Mikasa'll help."  
  
"Good _luck_ ," Mina said as they opened the classroom door. Armin laughed.

"Thanks. You too. Call me if you need someone to talk to later, okay?"

"I will."

 

_**Six Days Before** _

After School, Mina went straight to the climbing gym. She'd spent a lot of time there in the past few years, falling in love with the sport. This time she had come to work through her feelings by pushed herself into harder routes than normal. Three hours in, her hands were raw and her feet were cramping from the constricting shoes, and Mina didn't feel any better, just tired.

_Stupid_ , she told herself. What was it helping?

She took a hot shower to get all the chalk dust out of her skin and hair before leaving the gym. Once she left, she made a beeline for Café Marie and called Sasha. 

"What's up?" she asked.

"I'm picking you up and we're going to the bookstore. I don't want to be alone right now. Thinking isn't fun, I need you to distract me."

"I'm supposed to go with Connie to see a movie."

"I'll buy you a cappuccino with all the works," I offered.

Sasha paused on the other end. "...Five pumps? And extra syrup. And I have to meet Connie at eight."

"Deal. And thanks." We hung up.

Five hours later, Sasha, and Connie were gone.

 

_**Five Days Before** _

Mina didn't go to school. 

She talked to the police, since she'd apparently been the last one to see Sasha and Connie the day before. They never even made it to the movie theater. Mina had driven Sasha to the mall and dropped her off with Connie at the entrance by the food court, so they could get pizza before the 8:35 showing. Sometime between then and when the movie started, both of them disappeared. 

"What about the security cameras?" Mina asked the policeman who was questioning her. "Don't they show anything?"

"They walked down one of the restroom hallways out of the camera zones and never came out."

"Was there an exit there or something?"

"Maintenance door. We're looking into it."

That night she couldn't sleep. She laid curled up on top of her quilt in the dark, feeling numb. Sometime around 1 AM her phone lit up with a text from Armin— _Mina, are you okay?_

Then another one, right after. _That was a dumb question, don't answer that._  

He was just one person in a long line of friends who hadn't stopped trying to contact her all day. Words of comfort, of sympathy, of disbelief, of concern...she didn't want any of them. She stared at the screen until it faded back to black. A few minutes passed until he texted again: 

_I know how close you are with Sasha. I'm sorry you have to go through this with her, too. The others are bad enough. Is there anything I can do?_

For some reason, that last question made her angry, and she finally unlocked the phone.

_Can you tell me why?_ she texted back.  _Can you tell me who'll be next?_

Mina hit send, then dropped my phone on the floor. None of them deserved it. Why was there such cruelty in the world? Why would you rip someone away from their life and everyone they loved like that? It wasn't fair. It wasn't human. What kind of person could do that? And why? Was anyone safe anymore?

Why take Sasha, who was smart and clever, and funny like nobody's business, who spent her days always cheering people up and making life better. Why take Connie, or Marco? Why take anybody? What could any of us do against this kind of unreasonable evil? Nothing, it seemed.

Whoever was doing this would probably do it again. Anyone could be next.

With that cheerful knowledge, she rolled over to face the wall and let the hot, angry tears soothe her to sleep.


	2. Cracks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life goes on as best it can, with hitches here and there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for some anxiety/panic attacks.

**Four Days Before**

Another day passed, and no one vanished. Mina came back to school. People got a little less worried, and activity picked up around Sina again. Kids were back on playgrounds, albeit with more supervision than before, and after school activities continued as usual.

But the signs were still there. Mikasa pulled the scarf a little higher up over her chin and followed Eren’s every move with worried eyes. Mina walked a different hall to her classes so she didn’t have to pass Sasha’s locker where she spent so much time hanging out normally. 

Armin had filled a notebook and a half already with scratched out theories and complicated outlines that led to nothing, the fruit (or lack thereof) of several long calls with Erwin, who was taking time out of his busy freshman year at Sina University to work on it. And if Eren had deeper shadows under his eyes than normal and if Jean’s attempts to get the others riled up were less sharp than usual, well…no one was going to mention it.

In photography class that afternoon, Mina looked at Jean sitting at the computer next to her and said, “I know it’s cliche, but I wish this was a bad dream.”

Jean looked over at her with tired eyes. “Me too,” he said quietly, none of his usual fire evident. “Want to me to pinch you to check?”

Mina didn’t have the heart to laugh, and started telling Jean crazy stories about some people she’d been trying to teach at the climbing gym. It distracted both of them for a while while they worked on editing their projects. Armin watched how as they left the classroom later, Jean tugged one of her pigtails and whispered thank you as he passed her in the doorway.

**Three Days Before**

_Go over the information you have_  

But it doesn’t give me anything! 

_Look harder, there’s always something you can find_

I’ve looked for days, there’s nothing else I can find! There are too many missing pieces!

_You can figure it out, just give it time, be patient_

I don’t have time, they could be dying—

_Don’t give up Eren and the others need you to figure it out you’re the one who always figures things out_

I can’t! 

_Make a plan figure it out figure it out figure it out figure it out_

“I CAN’T!” Armin yelled, throwing his notebook across the room. It hit the wall with a loud thwack and fell onto his beanbag chair. Armin bent over with his elbows on his desk and twisted his hands into his hair, pulling it hard. "I can't," he whispered. 

As he gripped his hair, his mind kept racing over the same points it had been stuck on for hours. 

  1. Three people were missing, three people he knew, three people his age,
  2. His friends were counting on him to figure something out,
  3. He had no plans, he couldn't figure anything out,
  4. He was a failure and his friends were misplacing their trust,
  5. He was panicking.



And now he added another item to the list: it was six in the morning now and he had been up all night and he had school in an hour.

“Not again,” Armin muttered, and snatched his phone on the way to the bathroom. As he was waiting for the shower to get hot, he shot a quick text to Eren.

_Hey can you ask your dad if I can talk to him later_

Right before Armin was about to step under the water, his phone buzzed on the counter. He picked it up and saw Eren’s reply.

_Sure why? Is something wrong?_

Armin sighed.

 _No everything’s fine. Just give me a time, Eren_.

He dropped the phone back on the counter and stepped in the shower. Fifteen minutes wasn’t necessarily a very long shower, but it was long enough for him to have his breakdown in privacy. There was no way he was going to let it happen around his friends at school, and he didn’t want to worry his grandpa. He was supposed to be doing better about this.

As Armin leaned his head against the cool tile, his tears mixed with the shower water on his body as they dropped off his jaw. As the shudders rolled through him in waves, he gasped for air that seemed to vanish—too thin to give him oxygen, too thick with steam to breathe in, too cool too warm too little too much—

He knew, rationally, that he was getting enough air. He wasn’t going to die or pass out. But whenever he was hit by one of his attacks, he couldn’t stop himself from alternately not breathing and then hyperventilating, which resulted in him feeling like he couldn’t breathe and only made his panic worse. Over time, though, he’d gotten better at keeping the excess panic to a minimum. 

_It’ll pass it’ll pass it’ll pass._

Armin forced himself to even out his breathing until it was regular enough that he felt okay to actually wash his hair. As Armin turned the water off and reached for a towel, he absentmindedly rubbed his chest, feeling the familiar ache that would linger for hours after his panic attacks. 

———

As he parked in his usual corner of the university lot, Armin pulled his phone out of the glove box where he always set it while driving. Eren had texted him back saying that his dad wanted to talk with Armin himself whenever Armin got the chance. There were still a few minutes before he had to go in, so Armin decided to get it over with instead of sitting with it unresolved all morning until lunch. 

"Hello, Armin!" the voice came over the line.

"Hi Mrs. Jaeger. Could I talk to Mr. Jaeger please?" 

"Of course. He's been expecting you to call. Just a moment, I'll have him pick up." Armin heard muffled female hollering in the background and couldn't help grinning. Carla Jaeger liked to act proper and like a true lady, but really she was just as fiesty and energetic as Eren. Eren, like his mother, had a habit of just hollering for someone else in the house to pick up the phone instead of quietly going to them.

"Hello, Armin?" Mr. Jaeger said.

"Yes sir!" Armin replied. "I'm sorry to bother you like this, but..."

"You're struggling." 

"Yeah," Armin sighed.

"I thought you were probably going to be in touch. I'm guessing you want to try the meds again?"

"Yes, if that isn't a problem. It's been kind of rough..."

"Will you start talking with Petra again?"

"Yes, if you really think I need to. But my problem isn't figuring out what's bothering me or talking to someone about it. I can do those things easily. My problem is the anxiety and how I completely fly into a panic whenever I feel like I'm losing control of a situation."

"I'll write you a new prescription, but I really do think it would be good for you to make an appointment with Petra. Even if it's just a one time thing. You don't have to do it consistently, just when you need to. There are a lot of major things happening that make everyone unsettled right now, Armin. There's no shame in asking for help. Everyone is struggling right now, it’s not just you. People understand."

"But no one else is having three panic attacks a day because people are going missing. Everyone else seems to have it together."

"You'd be surprised, believe me. But it’s your choice. I can’t force you. Just promise me you’ll think about it, okay? Petra’s a good lady and pretty good at helping.”

“I know, I remember. I just don’t want to go back to that if I don’t need to.”

“Just keep the option open, Armin. Swing by my office on your way to the high school at lunch and I’ll have the bottle ready for you to pick up from the pharmacy downstairs.”

“Thanks, Mr. Jaeger.”

“You’re welcome. Good luck with everything today, and don’t forget that you and your grandpa are supposed to go to dinner with us at six.”

“I won’t. See you then.”

Armin hung up feeling a little less stressed. Just a few hours and then he could get the pills and take away some of the constant on-edge feeling he was so tired of. He’d never found a good way to describe it until he was talking about it with Marco one day and said it was like when you were walking along the edge of a curb and you tip off balance, but there’s that moment right before you tip all the way over and you’re completely tense—that’s what it was like. He was constantly stuck right in that split second of panic. 

As he walked to the lecture hall, he swiped through his texts and was a bit ashamed to realize that he’d never noticed Mina’s reply to his texts from the day before. She sounded pretty hurt behind the upset words, and he couldn’t really be mad at her for snapping at him. 

 _I’m sorry that I don’t have the answers,_ he texted back, _but I’m not going to give up, and you’d better not either. Will I see you at school today?_

She was apparently already on her phone, because her reply came seconds later.

_Yeah. I’ll be there. Are you okay?_

Armin paused. Even when she was a wreck emotionally herself, she was still concerned about her friends.

_Yeah, I’m fine._

Armin shoved his phone in his pocket without waiting for a reply.

* * *

“I wish I was dual-enrolled,” Mina grumbled.

They had this conversation at least once a week at the lunch table, and every time it was the same.

“No you don’t,” Armin said. “It’s three times the work and way harder to keep track of everything. Plus you could have, if you hadn’t chosen to do so many of your extracurriculars this school year instead of spreading them out.”

“But you don’t have to deal with other high school students 24/7.”

“No, I get to deal with them half the time, and the other half I get to deal with college students who can get hungover or high or just come to class in pajamas or not at all.”

“But it’s our senior year, so you’re getting some awesome experience for what college is going to be like. By the time you actually go to college next year you’re going to have plenty of experience already. The rest of us have to jump in cold turkey.”

“I don’t think that’s how the phrase goes.”

“Whatever, Armin! You know what I mean.” Mina tried to look mad, but she ended up laughing and ruined whatever effect it might have had. “You get to see Levi and Hange and Erwin and Mike and Nanaba all the time.”

“Only Mike and Levi go to Sina U, and they’re usually busy when I’m there. I don’t see any of them more than you do, and you see them plenty. Admit it, you’re grasping for straws here.”

“No I’m not. And you have a lot more time out of school doing the day, so you get more chances to meet up with them. I haven’t seen Mike and Nanaba in two weeks, and you just saw them Wednesday.”

“But that wasn’t to visit, it was only in passing at the café. You’re the one who goes to hang out with them at the mall."

“The school part itself is way better."

“It’s really not all that different from the high school classes. You still get lectured, some teachers and classes are boring, and there’s even more work.”

“You can get up and go to the bathroom whenever you want without having to get permission from anyone!”

“Okay. I’ll give you that one,” Armin laughed. Mina smiled. It was good to be bantering again like they usually did, instead of sitting in the gloomy moods that seemed to have taken over everyone. 

“If you two are finished debating the finer points of higher education,” Eren spoke up from next to Armin, “it would be awesome to go over—“

“Eren—“ Mikasa interrupted. Mina and Armin both tensed a bit, not wanting to talk about the disappearances. They were having a good lunch.

“—the plans for our Halloween party,” Eren finished, shooting Mikasa a quick scowl. “There are only a few weeks left and we still don’t have many details figured out besides the fact that it’s at my and Mikasa’s house and Mina is coming as a zombie.”

“What?!”

“She is?”

“I am not!”

“Kidding, kidding!” Eren laughed and held up his hands. “For real though, we need to figure things out. Do we want to have a particular theme or something?”

Mikasa looked at the table thoughtfully. “I think that would be cool. Maybe we could do some kind of steampunk-mummy theme—remember how for a while people were super obsessed with Egypt and mummies and everything?”

“Hey, good idea,” Eren said. “We could take the—“ He was interrupted by a crackling voice coming over the PA system. Unlike in many schools, the system wasn’t used very often at Rose High, so there was a lot of confused silence among the listening students.

“Attention students,” an indistinct adult voice echoed. “The police have informed us of a fourth kidnapping, and an anonymous threat of more to follow. In light of these developments, a district-wide lockdown has been issued for all schools. No one may leave the building unless accompanied by a parent, guardian, or other authorized adult. Your families are being notified. Please remain where you are until someone comes to get you. You may pick up your belongings as you leave.”

Everyone in the cafeteria was frozen as the news sunk in. Some started crying, others spoke in angry or shocked tones. Armin looked around at the others and simply asked, “Who?” No one had an answer.

Mikasa stood up. “I’ll go ask.” 

“They won’t tell you anything,” Eren objected.

“I’ll make them.” Mikasa’s words were steel. She walked out of the cafeteria and headed for the office.

When she came back, her eyes said the worst. “Nanaba.” 

“How?” Eren said, sounding tired.

“She went print an essay at the library and never came back.” Mikasa put her head down on the table and closed her eyes.

“This is insane,” Armin said distantly. “Why would someone keep doing this?”

“I don’t know,” Eren said, clenching his fist, “but if I ever find them, I’ll kill them!”

“Maybe don’t say that in the middle of a cafeteria in a situation like this, Eren,” Jean muttered, glancing around quickly.

Mina started at one of the far walls. “Oh no. Mike… He’s going to be a wreck. And we should check in with the others too, see if they’re okay…”

“None of us are okay,” Mikasa said, her voice muffled against the table. “There's nothing okay about any of this.”

No one had any answer to that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would have had this up earlier, on Saturday, but I was sick with a cold and got lazy. The next chapter should be up on Saturday like I originally planned.


	3. Zero.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The countdown ends.

**Two Days Before**  

Classes were canceled Friday. After three students from Rose High and one from Sina U had vanished in less than a week, the officials, parents, and students needed some time to sort things out.

Mina and Jean halfheartedly tried to get some kind of activity going with their other friends, but the others mainly wanted to have a do-nothing day. Eren, Mina found out from Armin later, slept in until two in the afternoon.

Mina spent her day trying to comfort Mike through texts, playing some Pokemon on her ancient Game Boy, and napping.

Mostly napping.

 

**One Day Before**

"Eren."

"Mina? What's up?"

"I'm going to the climbing gym. You're coming with me. You're the only person I know who's belay certified and I want to climb the upper walls for once. It's useless being belay certified myself if I don't have a partner."

"That's true, but why right now?"

"I'm going crazy. There's nothing to do! There are too many teenagers in this foster family and Mrs. Raleigh has to work a ton. If I have to spend one more hour in this house with Erica and Daniel someone is going to die."

"One day off of school and you're already this bad?"

"It's not my fault! You wouldn't believe what—just see if you can get anyone else to come and get to the climbing gym at eleven. We can all climb for a few hours and then get a late lunch. I'm going to get my gear and start driving."

"All right, all right. You already called Armin, I'm guessing?"

"Yeah. Let me know if anyone needs to be picked up on my way there."

"Will do."

* * *

 

Mina unlocked the doors so Armin could drop into the passenger seat of the car. He shut the door behind him, and as he buckled in she pulled the car out of park and started merging back onto the road.

"Thanks for picking me up," Armin said.

"No problem. I'm glad you're able to come. I know you're not coming to climb, Armin... So thanks for coming for me. I know you're only doing it because I asked." Mina glanced at him for a moment before looking back at the road.

"Mina, I want to come," he said. "I mean, yeah, I don't like climbing. I'm going to do what I usually do and just sit on the floor and watch what you guys do—"

"And be ridiculously helpful with telling us where we should go next," Mina interrupted.

"Yeah, I'll do that too. But I'm not that helpful." 

"Says you!"

" _Anyway_ ," Armin fake huffed, "I was trying to say that I'm going because you asked but also because I do want to go. I need a distraction, just like you. And I want to see everyone. Plus I haven't seen you climb in a while, which is a shame because have I ever told you how awesome you are at it?" 

"Shut up, I'm not that good."

  "You are! You can climb circles around the rest of us."

"No offense Armin, but that's just because the rest of you suck at it." Mina frowned. "Sorry. That was actually pretty mean. I feel bad about that now."

Armin shrugged and gave a light laugh. "Doesn't bother me, I don't even climb. Not after that first try when you dragged me to the gym freshman year. I still haven't forgiven you for that, you know."

"It was an ACCIDENT. How was I supposed to know you were afraid of random crow noises?"

"Mina, I BROKE MY ANKLE."

"I said I was sorry!"

"At least Eren didn't get it on camera, since he was too busy filming Mikasa nearly kicking their dad in the face while she was dangling on the rope all freaked out. That whole day was just a bunch of us randomly flailing around and screaming we were about to die while the climbing instructors sat there laughing at us."

"Except for me. They liked me."

"That's because you were the only one who didn't get stuck at the top when you have to let go and free fall on the rope to get down!"

"It's not free falling, Armin. It's controlled, you're kicking off the wall as you go down slowly."

"It's unnatural, that's what it is!"

Mina laughed.

"If people were meant to go up tall things," Armin said, "we'd have been given wings and we'd be able to just fly up there and it wouldn't be scary."

"Maybe we did have wings, and people cut them off or hid them because they were too scared to use them. Maybe we could grow wings again if we weren't too scared to take the jump and fly." Mina flicked the turn signal on and pulled into the parking lot.

"I worry about you sometimes," Armin moaned.

"Ah, don't worry! I'm not going to go jumping off of anything anytime soon. Maybe into something, like a pool or a ball pit, but I don't have a death wish. And anyway, if I have wings then we're good, right?"

"But you don't have wings."

"But what if I do? Maybe you do, too!"

"I don't have wings, trust me."

"You never know."

"Are you high or something? Should I have driven us here? Armin unbuckled as Mina parked the car. 

"I'm just playing, Armin!" She pulled the keys out. "You know I'm crazy. That's why we're friends."

"No, we're friends because I told you I loved you despite your insanity, and also because you're not scared off my my love for school. Even if you did get mad at me for a week after I outed you to the whole school as a nerd in 11th grade."

"And we both don't mind each others' issues. And we just generally like being with each other. So come on, fellow-nerd-whom-I-love, let's get in there before Eren and whoever he scrounged up beats us to the counter." 

"Seriously? Are you a literal five year old, this isn't a race—wait, you used whom. YOU USED WHOM OH GOSH MINA—"

"Yes, yes, I'm the one person in the world besides you who still cares about proper grammar. Hurry up and get in the building, it's freezing outside!"

"I'm the one holding the door, you get in!" Armin flung his arm wildly in the general direction of inside.

"Oh," Mina said. "Oops. Thanks."

"The things I do for my friends," Armin play-grumbled. The rest of his fake complaining was abandoned as Mina bopped a light kiss onto his cheek as she walked past him to the counter.

* * *

 

"Eren, stop swinging on the rope and get back on the wall already! My arms are getting tired!"

"But it's fun!"

"I'm gonna drop you," Mina growled.

Over on the bouldering wall, Levi was cheerfully throwing verbal abuse at Erwin as the man hung from one of the overhangs. Hange was on her back on the mats laughing at Levi's creative and colorful insults. Her favorite of the day was "glistening show-off ape of the rippling pecs." Erwin just calmly ignored Levi as sweat dripped off of his many, rippling, and well-defined muscles, per their usual interactions.

Armin watched with Mikasa as Eren climbed, belayed by an exasperated Mina.

"They're both idiots," Mikasa said flatly as they listened to another bicker between Eren and Mina.

"But they're our idiots," Armin replied.

"True. Doesn't mean we can't think they're ridiculous. And at least Mina is a friendly little angel that everyone loves. Mr. Fireball over there finds it hard to make friends with his anger issues and black-and-white morality."

"He can't help it," Armin defended. "Eren's always been like that. And honestly, I think he's mellowed out a bit."

Mikasa sighed—or at least blew a soft puff of air out of her nose, just enough to make the edge of her scarf flutter. "You don't have to hear him every night when he rants about the nutjob who's kidnapping people. I wish he would stop." She paused. "No, I wish the kidnappings just hadn't happened in the first place. It doesn't make sense."

"There's no real connection between who's been taken that anyone can see," Armin agreed. "But it has to be there..." He looked thoughtful. "It's kind of weird that it's high schoolers and a college student, not kids. Why wouldn't you go after kids if you want someone young? They'd put up less of a fight and they'd be easier to keep under control. Plus they're just easier to kidnap. Not that I would know, of course!"

"Believe me, Armin, I don't think you're a psychotic kidnapper. I know you're too scared to ask for a spoon at restaurants."

"Mikasaaaaa!" Armin moaned.

Mikasa simply pulled he scarf up to hid her grin.

As she looked around and noticed that everyone in their group was going at it with someone else (except Hange, of course, who was laughing at everyone's arguments), Mina thought about how much more relaxed everyone seemed compared to how they were lately. Sometimes, she supposed, what people really needed was some good friendly arguing to release tension. Whatever the reason, Hange was at least getting some good entertainment.

* * *

 

**Then**

1\. Hange and Mina left for a day of friend time at ten, ready for stops at the bookstore, the planetarium, and Marie’s café.

2\. Hange wouldn’t shut up in the bookstore. Mina wouldn’t shut up in the planetarium. She also spammed Armin’s phone with pictures and all-caps messages about rocket parts and old documents and lasers and space rocks and something about Buzz Aldrin’s hand.

3\. Hange engaged Levi in a snark war over the phone in Marie’s until Marie kicked Hange outside for the rest of the conversation to—as Marie put it— kindly spare the rest of the establishment from over-inventive phrases, however impressive they might be.

4\. Hange agreed to give Eren a ride home from his soccer practice since his mom couldn’t pick him up anymore—his grandma had fallen and needed someone to come over.

5\. After getting Eren, the three drove in Hange’s truck to get Chinese food. Mina asked Armin if he wanted to come, but he declined. She told him they were going the scenic route instead of the main roads home, and she’d get on skype when she was back at her house. They took the back road home after that, along the woods and the string of ponds.

6\. That was a bad decision.

7\. After Armin couldn’t get any of them to answer their phones—or track them using GPS—he called the police and their families.

8\. Eren’s soccer ball was found on the side of the road seven hours later, almost hidden under weeds. There were tire tracks nearby. Further into the trees, smashed cell phone parts were scattered in the undergrowth.

9\. Hange’s truck was found sixteen hours after that, in the bottom of a nearby pond.

10\. There was no sign of the three passengers. They, like the four before them, had vanished without a trace.


	4. Boxes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The panic that he'd been shoving down all night rose up even stronger than before, and in the privacy of the office a drained and exhausted Armin flew straight into one of the worst panic attacks of his entire life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: this chapter goes into descriptive detail with a panic attack. You might want to skip around to avoid that.

Armin had been in the police station for hours. How long he'd been sitting in that particular office room alone, he didn't know. Armin had called the police around ten the night before once he'd realized what must have happened, and they told him to come to the station. He'd been there ever since. All night, the police department had been trying to locate the teens and their car with no luck. They'd used Armin's phone to trace Mina, Eren, and Hange's, but they had only gotten a few faint pings from Hange's. They tracked it to a spot partway down the backroad, and along treeline they spotted a soccer ball. It had Eren's name on it.

When they informed Armin of that, they'd taken him into an office and started asking him to tell them what had happened. When they found out he knew  _every single_ missing teen, they wanted to go over everything he knew that had happened in the last few weeks. Armin sat in the office with police detectives the entire night, explaining events and discussing possible theories. They were only interrupted twice: first to be informed somewhere in the wee hours of the morning first that the Jaegers, the Smiths (Hange had moved in with Erwin's family in Sophomore year of high school), and Mina's foster mother had gotten there; second, to be informed that the teen's smashed cell phones had been found in the woods, but sign of the truck or the teens themselves.

Armin had wanted to go out to the others, but the police said they needed him still and that the families were being updated on the situation privately. He could see them later when everyone was finished. Armin reluctantly agreed.

When they told him the smashed phones had been found, Armin knew he had been right. His worst fears about the situation were coming true. He had hoped that maybe, even though it would have been bad, they had gotten mugged or crashed the car going around a curve. But with no sign of them or the truck, and with their phones smashed in the woods not far from where Eren's ball had apparently fallen out of the truck...it was hard to imagine it not being a kidnapping.

When the detectives finally left Armin alone, he slouched back into the uncomfortable office chair and glanced at the blinds, noticing how bits of orange sunrise were visible through the gaps. Had it really only been all one night? Had he only texted with Mina a matter of hours ago?

He should've said yes to Mina. 

He should've gone with them. He should have been there.

But no. Would he have ended up getting taken too? Would he be dead by now? Were they dead? Did it even matter? Would it be better to be dead with them than live and have to deal with not knowing, deal with all the what-ifs and could-have-beens and if-onlys?

The panic that he'd been shoving down all night rose up even stronger than before, and in the privacy of the office a drained and exhausted Armin flew straight into one of the worst panic attacks of his entire life. That was what the poor rookie officer walked in on a few minutes later, completely unprepared to deal with the situation. He ran back out to the main area almost hollering something about "there's a blonde kid dying in Morris' office help," and luckily Grisha overheard and realized what was going on. With permission from the chief, he had the rookie take him to the "dying blonde kid" who, just as he had suspected, turned out to be none other than a very panicked and very overwhelmed Armin Arlert.

* * *

 "Armin."

_Can't breathe can't breathe can't breathe_

"Armin. You're having a panic attack."

 _I KNOW THAT I KNOW I CAN FEEL IT_ _cantbreathecantbreathe_

"I know it feels like you can't breathe right now—"

_Yeah it really does_

"—but remember that as awful as it feels and as scary as it is, you  _are_ still breathing and you  _can_ breathe and you aren't dying. You're getting enough air. Too much air, actually."

_Yeah I have to keep remembering that I can breathe even though it feels like I can't but there's too much going on and it's too hard to think I can't—I keep forgetting to breathe—I can't remember it's too hard—_

"Tell yourself you can breathe. That's the only thing I need you to try to focus on. Just keep reminding yourself that you can breathe, and that you need to breathe. Focus on that. Count your breaths."

_Breathe. One. Two. Oh my gosh they're gone I was just talking with them what do I do what do I do how—_

"Armin! Breathe."

_Right, one, two, three, oh man I—four. Five...but—_

"Armin, is it okay if I touch you?"

Armin managed to gasp out a "yes." Grisha cupped Armin's small and trembling shoulders with his steady hands.

"Okay, Armin, I want you to breathe with me. Ready?"

_No not really_

"Straighten up. Come on Armin, sit up. Give your lungs some room to work."

_It hurts though—fine—ow—_

"Good. Do you remember the breathing box? Trace it on your thigh. Breathe in, hold your breath, breathe out, hold your breath. Keep doing that. Make it bigger. Nope. Nope, slow it down. Make the square bigger and breathe deeper. There you go. Keep going."

_In, hold, out, hold, in, hold, out, hold...In, hold, out...hold...In, hold...out, hold..._

"Keep doing it."

Time was frozen for Armin. The only thing he was aware of was the tense panic and his breathing box.

_In...hold...out...hold._

"Much better. A little longer."

_In...hold. Out...hold._

"Now look at me. Hands on your chest. We're going to breathe together. Ready? In...out. Nice and slow. In...out..."

Armin felt his control coming back slowly. He was able to think again, but he was so exhausted and muddled that he just wanted to go to cry, go to sleep, and not have to communicate with people, not necessarily in that order. His thoughts weren't racing anymore, but it was like thinking through a swampy haze. As Grisha finally let go of his shoulders, satisfied that the main part of the attack was over, Armin dropped his head onto his knees with a long, shuddering sigh. 

Grisha stood up and placed a hand on Armin's hunched back. "Do you need him for anything right now?" he asked the policeman.

"I—no, I don't think so. We'll have to ask him some more questions later, but he's free to go as soon as we get his phone back from the technicians. I can go grab that now, if you want?"

"Please do."

The policeman left the room, shutting the office door behind him. Armin raised his head and looked at Grisha. "I'm sorry...for making you do that. You have enough to deal with already...you just lost Eren. Sorry."

"Armin, don't apologize," Grisha said. "Two of your close friends have gone missing, after several others vanished as well and you've been worrying about them. And not only that, but you were the one who realized that Eren, Mina, and Hange had vanished and contacted the authorities. You’ve been dealing with all of this alone all night. Anyone would be due for a breakdown.”

Armin just looked away.

“As soon as they give you back your phone, I’m going to take you home so you can go to bed.”

“It’s fine, I can drive—“

“I insist.”

Armin knew it was Grisha’s way of making it clear that he was there for Armin and—also that knowing Armin had been up all night with the police and then just had a panica attack, there was no way he was letting Armin drive home. It would be almost worse than driving drunk.

"Okay." It was a relief to not have to worry about driving, truthfully. He could do it, but it would have been awful. And there was no way his grandfather could have driven to pick him up with a broken shoulder. "Thanks...wait, what about my car?" Armin pushed himself up out of the chair. He was so sore...

"If you leave the keys with Mikasa I'll have her drive it to your house when we leave, and we'll pick her up from there. Don't worry."

"Thanks," Armin said again. The police officer came back in with a sealed plastic bag.

"Here's your phone back," he said, handing it to Armin. "We got everything that might be helpful. You signed the release form earlier, right?"

"Yeah."

"And there aren't any further questions for you at the moment. So you're free to go. We'll be in touch."

"Okay." Armin was too tired to care enough about communicating through his foggy brain at the moment. Grisha told the officer he'd be back to talk some more after taking Armin home, and the man said that was fine. Grisha steered Armin out through the hallways and to the car, where Armin silently climbed into the passenger seat and almost forgot to buckle in and close the door. 

It was a short ride to the house Armin shared with his grandfather, but Armin was already dozing when Grisha pulled into the driveway. 

"Armin. Armin, wake up." Grisha reached over and shook the him. Armin opened his eyes halfway.

"Whu.."

"We're at your house. Time to get out so you can go to bed."

"Oh...right..." Armin fumbled with the seatbelt for a few seconds before he got it undone. He almost laid back on the seat again, but he forced himself to open the door and get out. "Thanks for driving me home," he mumbled. 

"Any time. Come to our house later, when things are a little less crazy." Grisha replied, then pulled out of the driveway. Armin raised his hand halfheartedly, unable to convince his muscles to make the effort for a full goodbye wave. 

Armin trudged up to the front door and let himself in with his key. He shut the door and slipped to his room quietly, not wanting to wake his grandpa. It  _was_ only—Armin glanced at his alarm clock—not even seven AM yet? Armin groaned. There was no way he was going to school. If school hadn't been canceled, anyway. Not happening.

Armin didn't even bother taking his shoes or jacket off before he dropped onto his bed.

* * *

 

The next two days were mostly a blurred daze for Armin. What he did get out of them was two things:

1) No matter what happened from there on out, everyone's lives had been changed dramatically for good. There was going to be a lot of adjusting, and Armin was already not coping well. He wasn't looking forward to the coming days and weeks.

2) They weren't going to give up. The adults were searching through the official methods. The teens...had their own. Erwin, Levi, Armin, Mikasa, and Jean all had a terribly powerful combination of guilt, anger, and desperation that gave them a powerful drive to do  _anything_  they could, and do a lot of it. Erwin, of course, put that to good use.

Erwin Smith had always been well-connected. He was pulling in favors and resources from everyone from the homeless druggies to local politicians, and had teamed up with Armin to analyze everything they got their hands on. Armin decided he'd never be an enemy of Erwin, and that he'd really rather not find out how Erwin had gotten the police department and city council under his thumb. Some things were better left unknown.

So Jean ran as a messenger, Levi and Mikasa (both of whom were filled with a cold rage about the events) were used to convince people when necessary, and Armin and Erwin theorized and planned. Within a week, they'd been snowed under with more information than they knew what to do with, and apart from fielding any new information that came in, it was now all a matter of hunting out the patterns, tracing the truth. What were the connections? What was the center all of it stemmed from? Whatever it was, it was _elusive,_  Erwin grouched one night as he threw aside another stack of papers in frustration.

"This whole situation," Armin said one evening while they were holed away in the Kirschsteins' basement, "is a giant game of Clue. Except in this peoples' lives are at stake, people we love. So it isn't just about winning the game. We can't just find that oh, it was Colonel Mustard in the greenhouse with the lead pipe'—we have to do it fast, and we have to find out  _why."_

"That's the million-dollar question these days," Levi growled. " _Why."_

"Why us?" Mikasa agreed. "Why now? Why here?"

"Why kidnap them?" Erwin pointed out. "Why teens? Why do they all know each other?"

Jean shoved himself up off the sofa and moved to leave, needing a break. As he left, threw out one last question of his own.

"What," he asked, starting up the stairs, "would make a person want to kidnap anyone in the first place?"

* * *

 Armin didn't know, but he was going to figure it out.

He  _had_ to figure it out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this chapter doesn't have a whole lot of plot development, but it's important. And you get to see the kidnappees next chapter. Are you ready for Mina and what her point of view might show?


	5. Lambs to the Slaughter

When Mina wakes up for the first time, the pain in her head is the only thing she can focus on and she's only vaguely aware of darkness and voices whispering. After a few minutes of laying in a semi-conscious haze, she drifts off again and wonders if that's someone crying she can hear just as she's losing consciousness.

She wakes up again for seconds or eternities after that—it's impossible for her to tell when all she knows is a pounding skull and throwing up from neverending nausea. Sometimes she can feel a hand running through her hair, or hear a raised voice, or feel a cold hardness under the side she's curled up on, but they're only glimpses and she's too muddled to think about what they mean.

Finally, she opens her eyes and knows she's awake for real. It doesn't take long for her to start wishing she wasn't again.

* * *

 There was darkness, and it was cold. Unforgiving concrete. Silence. The only sounds were coughs and little breath sounds people make and clanking,

always clanking—

* * *

 Chains. Chained at the wrist, the neck, chains clanking every time they moved, holding them captive in too small a space. No stretching no standing no moving more than a few feet by scooting—

* * *

 "The others are here too? Everyone?"

"Everyone. Sasha's right there next to you."

Reaching, feeling in the dark—

Mina cried herself to sleep clinging to her best friend like she'd never see her again.

* * *

 Concrete and lead. Darkness. Mina decided that once she got out she would never want to be underground ever again. There was no reason great enough to require being in this kind of hell. 

"It's a bomb shelter," she had informed the others after feeling around and yelling a bit to get a feel for the size of the space. "One of the little ones people used to build into basements. A friend of mine from middle school used to live in a house with one...there was a concrete passage to it behind shelving. They used it for storage. I guess he decided this one would be put to better use as an illegal holding cell for kidnappees." That got a quiet snort out of Eren.

"There's another room in this, too," Marco said. "Across from the door that gets leads in here. That's where...it's..."

"That's where he takes us," Nanaba said. There was no emotion left in her voice. 

Mina didn't press.

* * *

 Nanaba, as it turned out, was the next one taken to the other room. There was no way to tell time in the dark silence, but most of them had been dozing when the door slammed open and he grabbed Nanaba who was fighting so hard Mina couldn't believe she wasn't able to escape.

There was no way to block out the sound of her screams. 

"What is he doing to her?" Mina whispered. Hange and Eren didn't know. They hadn't been there any longer than Mina. Sasha was rocking silently, head buried in her knees. Marco cried in the corner. It was Connie who answered her.

"Anything he can," he muttered. "Does it really matter what, specifically? It all has the same effect."

Mina decided she didn't really want to know.

* * *

 The next time screams echo around the concrete, they're her own.

* * *

 Mina had always had this idea that she could be brave if she needed to. That if she was held at gunpoint for something she believed in, she wouldn't break down. That if she was attacked, she would fight back. That if she had to be tortured, she could hold it together like the heroes and secret agents in the books and movies she loved. Mina had always thought she could be strong.

Real life, she learned, was not a story. Pain was a lot different in practice than in theory, and as soon as the knife dug into her back all her ideas of stoic silence and not giving him the satisfaction of hearing her in pain were thrown out the window. Some reactions were just involuntary, like the first startled gasp.

Some were helpful in letting out your emotions, like the ragged sobs she still tried to keep controlled as the pain kept growing.

And some were necessary for retaining a grasp on the threads of sanity, like her screaming that started less than two minutes in.

* * *

 "You're all the same," he snarled at one point, while she screamed through burning tears. "You aren't any use to me until I've broken you. It can take time but everyone can be worn down. I just have to find what makes you hurt the most."

His only answer was another scream.

* * *

 Hange keeps talking at him. Talking and talking and sometimes it's yelling but she never stops hurling logic and questions at him except when she screams. She cries and she asks him a million times why and what it will accomplish and what does he want and she screams and she tells him the effects of what he's doing to their immune systems and what it's doing to his mind and asking him how he's keeping this secret and who he has helping him and she gasps and tells him he—

—can't get away with it forever, he can hurt them and break them and kill them if he wants but he'll be caught one day, no question—

—what does he want, what does he  _want—_

and one time he takes her in the room and she screams and then she stops 

and he brings her back to the chains and Mina scrambles over as soon as he's gone, it hurts to move and she feels the cuts opening but she has to get to Hange, Hange is never quiet she always makes sure they know she's okay (or as okay as she can be, alive anyway)

and then Mina is there, and she's reaching, touching, and there is blood, so much blood. All over Hange's shoulders, and up, on her neck, and there are rough stitches there with a couple of rags twisted around above the metal collar and Mina feels so many tears on Hange's cheeks—

Hange doesn't speak anymore after that. She can't.

The next time he comes, they see him in the dim light from the doorway as he nods and says, "I like you much better like this."

As they listen to Connie's sobs through the door, Mina doesn't even try to quiet Eren's ranting about killing the man for what he's done. She can't talk sense into him when she wants to do the same thing.

* * *

 Sasha isn't giving him what he wants. She gives him no pleasure, she does not cooperate. He broke her, but she isn't broken to be obedient. She's just broken, and there's nothing beautiful about it. Her eyes are dead. Mina cries for what her friend once was and she knows, she knows what's going to happen—

Sasha comes back out of the room. She doesn't go in the chains again. She doesn't move from where he throws her on the floor.

Connie doesn't get it, he stretches out as far as he can and begs Sasha to move, begs her to say she's okay, asks if he's hurt. Mina doesn't move, she knows. She knows she knows she knows knows knows and she doesn't want to think

It's Marco who finally tells Connie that Sasha isn't breathing.

Connie screams for a while, to angry to cry, and then he doesn't talk to them until the next time he comes.

* * *

 As soon as Connie is out of the chains, he's going for the man's neck, trying to kill him, and he's starved and weak and has no chance. But his rage gives him fuel, and a strength he shouldn't have, and he manages to scrape a long cut on the man's cheek that earns him his death.

The knife is still in his chest when he's thrown down by Sasha.

It's fitting, Mina thinks, in a really sick and twisted way, that the two should be together in death. They were going to get married. Connie was going to ask Sasha at Homecoming, he was going to ask her and he'd asked Mina to help him plan it and they would have been  _married_

and now they weren't even going to graduate high school.

* * *

 Sasha was dead. Connie was dead. They weren't good enough, he said. They weren't right, they weren't enough. Marco wasn't either. He didn't take Marco's life yet, just an arm. Still hope for you yet, he said. Marco wished there wasn't. 

* * *

 Mina was put back in her chains when he left one time and Nanaba couldn't breathe. She was gasping and wheezing and Mina reached for her (who cared about blood anymore, she would never have guessed they had that much to lose) and Nanaba was  _on fire._

* * *

"She's got an infection," Eren croaked. His father was a doctor. Eren knew his stuff. "But there's nothing we can do. We don't have medicine. We don't have water. We can't even see where the infection is because it's too dark."

Mina huddled on the floor next to Nanaba and just touched her, kept one hand on her arm at all times. It was the only thing she could do. 

Maybe dying wasn't so bad if you knew someone was there with you.

* * *

 He made Eren his pet. 

"Your eyes are so beautiful," he would croon, and he'd try to give Eren sweets and caress his chin like a puppy. Eren spat out the treats and tried to spit in his face.

"You're sick," he would rasp, and then the man would shake his head.

"I'm disappointed in you. I wish you would just learn your lesson and behave. I guess I have to teach you more still."

Then Eren would be gone.

* * *

 "Jenny, please, look at your daddy."

_I'm not your daughter I'm not Jenny please please leave me alone_

"Jenny. Look at me honey, I love you so much."

_I am not Jenny I am not Jenny I am not Jenny_

_If you loved me, if you loved her, if you loved Jenny you wouldn't hurt her you wouldn't do these things_

"Just tell me you love me," he whispered. "I've missed you so much. Just say how much you love me and everything will be okay, baby."

_I don't love you I don't love you you're a horrible man and you hurt us you killed them you're hurting me stop hurting me please please stop please_

_don't touch my hair stop touching my hair I am not your daughter I am not Jenny_

_I AM NOT YOUR DAUGHTER_

 

Blood stained her skin and her heart strained to do its job and tears ran down her cheeks and he  _wouldn't stop stroking her hair_

* * *

Hange couldn't speak, and now she didn't even move. She laid where she was thrown and she didn't respond to the others. Mina could hear her sniffles, though, as she cried.

* * *

 Eren's anger never faded, and he was frustrated to tears. He was so helpless to do anything, he was being treated like an animal and everyone was being hurt and he couldn't do  _anything_ and it was so  _wrong—_

* * *

 Annie looked in once, started to cry, and ran.

Bertholdt whispered _I'm so sorry_ and ran after her.

* * *

Mina knew when Nanaba stopped breathing, knew the exact moment and felt Nanaba grow cold. 

Marco got an infection too, and Eren started keeping his hand on him.

Later Marco lost his leg. It got rid of the infection, but Marco almost died. He breathed, but he didn't wake up anymore. Hange was silent, Eren was a pet, and Mina...

* * *

  _I AM NOT YOUR DAUGHTER I AM NOT JENNY I AM NOT YOUR DAUGHTER I AM NOT YOUR DAUGHTER_

He wouldn't let her rest—

* * *

 There was a time when Mina had just wondered how long it would take for them to be found and rescued. Then there was a time Mina wondered how long it would take them to recover. Now Mina wondered how long she had to wait until she could die and finally have one second of rest.

* * *

 "Jenny I love you please just smile, talk to me—"

_I AM NOT JENNY I AM NOT JENNY LET ME DIE ALREADY I AM NOT YOUR DAUGHTER._

* * *

  _I just want it to end._


	6. The Art of Not Coping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armin angst and major plot developments.
> 
> If—no. When. When she was found. 
> 
> Right. Stay positive.

One week.

Two. Three. Four. 

Five.

Six weeks.

Two months. 

It was mid-December and they still hadn't found the missing teens.

 _Armin_ hadn't found them. Armin hadn't found anything.

He hadn't found  _her._

He wasn't even close.

* * *

 

His room was pristine. Books organized, floor clean, desk clear, bed made, clothes hung, no dust. It almost didn't look lived in, and that's how Armin liked it. A clean roomed equalled a clear mind, and he always wanted his mind working at full capacity.

The only thing that didn't fit with his normal system of organization were a giant pile of notebooks and paper scraps on the rocking chair and a large cardboard box sitting up against the wall, full of things that weren't his. They were Mina's. Her foster mother wasn't a bad woman, just practical to a fault. When Armin had stopped by the house after a week to ask if he could see Mina's things—just in case he would catch something the police had missed—the woman had already had all of Mina's possessions boxed up and in the basement. She told him to take it, since social services didn't have anything they could do with the stuff. The room Mina had been staying in was already redone and ready for a new tenant. 

It was like Mina had never existed. 

Armin went home, taking her box with him, and thought about how little the rest of them must have actually understood Mina's life. They all thought she was pretty happy, which she was. But they didn't know she was so...alone. 

If she was found, would she have to go back to that? Armin swore to himself he wouldn't let that happen. She deserved to live with people who really cared about her more than just fulfilling a duty to get government money.

No. When. When she was found. 

Right. Stay positive.

Stay positive.

* * *

 

 

 

Three months.

"Hey Armin, no offense, but you're looking pretty bad." Jean grabbed Armin's arm as he caught up to him in the hallway.

"Buzz off Jean," Armin mumbled, twisting away. He knew what he looked like. He knew he had the shadows under his eyes and the porcelain skin. He knew he looked like walking death. 

"Seriously, are you okay man?" Jean hopped a few steps to catch up again.

"I'm fine!" Armin snapped. "Jean, just leave me alone, okay?" He sped up, leaving a startled and hurt-looking Jean behind. Armin knew Jean was just worried, trying to help, and he already felt guilty for lashing out at him. But he just needed everyone to leave him alone for a while. Pulling up in the middle of the hallway, he paused. 

His French classroom was on the right, the back hallway to his left. Armin spun on his heel and walked to the left, spending the period in the corner stall of the run-down old boys bathroom. He wasn't feeling good enough to conjugate irregular verbs. His grades could take one absence, anyway.

* * *

 

Mike put a hand on Armin's shoulder as he was leaving the Smiths' house after a group study session for Microeconomics. 

"Armin," he said slowly, with extra softness in his voice, "get more sleep."

Armin had to nod before he got in his car and left, but sleep just wouldn't come.

* * *

 

Annie, Reiner, and Bertholdt each offered him a ride home on separate occasions, claiming he looked tired and it was a long walk with a heavy backpack. He politely declined, saying he had his own car and could drive himself home, but thanks for the offer.

The second time Annie asked, he reminded her he could drive himself. She'd seemed flustered and run off. Unusual for Annie, he thought, but hey. Everyone had been acting a little differently after...after what happened.

* * *

 

Mikasa worried daily over how Armin was looking. 

"Armin," she chided, "you've always been thin, but I think you've lost weight. You need to eat more."

"Fine, yeah," he mumbled. Armin spent the rest of the lunch period carefully cleaning his cafeteria plate to make her happy.

* * *

 

"Hey Armin, you okay?" Hannah asked as she lapped Armin for the third time. It was getting close to the end-of-semester PE challenges and the gym teacher was making them work on dropping their times for the mile. Lap after lap after lap around the gym took their toll on the students, and after a while the only two who didn't appear to be in various states of death by asphyxiation were Mikasa and Ymir.

Armin held up a hand as he forced his legs to keep stumbling along in some vague attempt at a run. Control your breathing, force a quick smile. It's fine. You're fine. "Yeah," he wheezed. "Yeah—'M good."

"Are you sure?"

He nodded and waved her on. As soon as she had turned her back, he went back to his desperate gasping.

_Come on lungs come on keep it together. Just a little longer. Then you can take a break. Keep it together just a little bit, come on...come on...no, no don't go there—_

He'd started coughing. Armin knew it was the point of no return. 

 _Come on!_  he pleaded mentally. _Come on, please, you can hang in there for a few more minutes..._

They couldn't. 

Armin half woke up flat on his back on the hardwood gym floor, dazed and still desperate for air. He could  _feel_ the layer of grimy dust sinking into his hair and clothes. When he blinked his eyes open, he realized he was surrounded by a crowd of frantic students and a hysterical gym teacher who was screeching loudly and flitting around holding a cell phone. Armin groaned and drifted back into blissful darkness where he didn't have to feel his lungs aching and burning screaming at him for air.

* * *

 

Grisha Jaeger sat down heavily in the chair next to the ER bed. Armin followed his movement only with his eyes. Every inch of him screamed exhaustion, from his shadowed eyes and too-pale skin to his oxygen mask and the struggling rise and fall of his chest.

"Armin..." Grisha started.

Armin knew what was coming.

"You're a wreck." 

Yeah, what else was new? 

"Why didn't you talk to anyone? We could have helped." 

Armin shook his head tiredly.

"Armin. You haven't been eating. You've barely slept. You can't keep going like this."

Armin dragged the mask down for a moment. "...'ave been...eating..." he whispered. "Just...doesn't...show."

"Stress?" Grisha asked. Armin shrugged tiredly. Grisha sighed.

"Look. I talked to the others. They wanted to admit you but I got them to agree to letting you go—IF you go home with me. You're going to stay with us for a while and we're going to get you back on track." Armin looked like he wanted to protest, and Grisha gave him a stern look. "No arguments. You're coming home with me tonight, and you're taking a few days off school to get your strength back. You haven't had an asthma flare up like in years. It gets harder to bounce back the older you get. I'm sure you're feeling pretty bad right now."

Armin couldn't help looking miserable at that point. He was too tired to even pretend.

"I'll be back for you in a couple of hours. I already have a nebulizer in the car." He stood and walked to the doorway.

"Armin?" said Grisha as he paused to look back.

Armin's eyes flicked up tiredly. 

"Your Grandpa said he went in your room and you'd gone all-out Sherlock on your walls with paper and strings. Trying to figure it out. I just want to say—" Grisha stopped. "I just want to say that...you didn't go about it in a good way, you should have taken care of yourself, but...thanks. For trying. For—not giving up. It means a lot, that you haven't given up." Grisha hovered in the doorway for a few seconds in silence before turning back to the hallway and leaving Armin alone once more.

* * *

Grisha ended up keeping Armin out of school for a full week. He made sure Armin wasn't stressing himself out too much and his lungs were getting the chance to recover properly, and got Armin on some different anti-anxiety meds that were already seeming to help. With three people there to make sure he slept, the dark circles under Armin's eyes started vanishing.

Carla kept Armin company when he wanted it and provided him with a never-ending stream of really fattening food (which in Armin's case only got him back to where he was supposed to be—he heard Mikasa grumbling about that a bit when she did her evening workout for an extra ten minutes to work off the large amount fried pickles Carla had made). Mikasa brought home the homework assignments from his teachers at the high school, and Erwin came by every other day with the homework from his college professors (and some new theories to discuss out of earshot of the adults).

Finally, the next Tuesday evening, Armin was back at his own house and making sure he was ready to go back to classes the next day. He'd checked and triple-checked that all the homework was finished and his backpack was packed. Erwin and Levi swung by to pick him up for a trip to the bowling alley. 

"I hate bowling," Levi muttered as he stared out the passenger seat window of Erwin's minivan. 

"I'll buy you as many fries as you want," Erwin placated him. Armin smiled a little as he looked out the window at the nighttime city lights flashing by.

"The whole place is filthy. And the bowling balls, everybody touches them with their fingers and who _knows_ how many germs are all over them—“

“You have your own ball, Levi,” Armin interjected.

“And don’t even get me STARTED on the _shoes_ —“

"Levi, we're going to the bowling alley! You agreed last night." Erwin reminded him.

"You blackmailed me."

_"Levi."_

"Levi?" Armin asked quietly?

"What?"

"I—I just—thanks."

Levi twisted around the side of the seat to look at Armin. "The heck are you thanking me for, kid?"

"Just...being yourself. Being normal. It makes a difference." Levi stared at Armin for a few seconds, scrutinizing his face. Then he turned back around and slumped heavily against the seat.

"Yeah, whatever, kid. You're welcome, I guess. Although I have no idea what on earth you find appealing about this."

"This what?" Armin asked.

"Any of it. Hanging out with us two old fogeys ( _'We're only a year older than him!'_ _Erwin protested_ ), working with us and the others all this time when nothing ever pans out, going to a fucking  _bowling alley..."_

"We're here!" Erwin practically chirped.

When they were all inside, shoes on and balls at the ready and a giant plate of ketchup with fries sitting ready, Armin couldn't help feeling like things were getting to be a bit more okay.

* * *

 

He had only been looking for the bathroom. It was supposed to be a simple bathroom run. But he'd gotten lost and went to the wrong side of the bowling alley near the staff doors and now there was someone trying to grab him and drag him out the side exit and  _he couldn't get away and he couldn't scream they were covering his mouth—_

"Get off him!" a familiar voice snarled. A second later, Armin was being yanked the opposite direction by Erwin's strong arms, suddenly free from his attacker (courtesy of Levi). Armin was shaking. As Erwin let go of him, he noticed a cloth on the floor—wet with some kind of substance, dropped by the attacker. He was willing to bet anything it was chloroform.

Levi himself was sitting on the person's back, twisting their hands painfully behind their back. "Who are you?" he snarled. Erwin reached down and yanked the person's hood back to reveal the kidnapper—

It was Annie.

* * *

 

Things moved quickly after that. Annie called in Bertholdt, and the two of them gave their confessions to the police. Annie's was dispassionate, Bertholdt's teary, but both of them had the same story. And neither of them had wanted to kidnap anyone. They'd been forced into it by Annie and Reiner's father.

Her father, Mr. Leonhardt, and Reiner, were both... _unstable,_ as Annie had put it, after the car crash that had killed Mrs. Leonhardt and Annie's little sister Jenny a few years earlier. Bert had been adopted a just before the crash.

The crash had been the fault of a drunk high schooler on a homecoming night that had run a red light and hit their car head-on. Mr. Leonhardt—Edward—and Reiner had lost their grip on reality partly, to where they wanted revenge on all teenagers. They wanted to make them pay. So the two had devised a plan to kidnap teenagers and make them go through pain as penance.

"He hated me," Annie told them dispassionately. "He hated me for living when Jenny didn't. She was his favorite. He never saw me as his daughter anymore after the accident."

"We didn't want to do any of it," Bert had begged them to understand through his tears. "The things he threatened to do if we didn't obey him—you have to understand. We didn't want to. We didn't want to. But we couldn't let him—he was going to  _kill_ us—"

* * *

 

Within hours a tactical team was on a rescue mission. Armin and the others waited at the police station in silent agony, waiting to hear anything at all. Finally, after over two hours of waiting, several detectives and FBI agents came in with news. One of the officers who had interviewed Armin when it all began came over to him, almost teary-eyed.

Armin was terrified. It was going to be the worst. She was—

"... _alive,_ " he suddenly heard the man saying. "Armin, she's alive! She's alive."

For the first time in months, Armin felt a real smile light up his face. He sat down in one of the chairs and cried, overwhelmed by the rush of relief and joy and the effects of months of constant fear and worry suddenly vanishing.

One word was all that mattered. One word had changed everything.

Alive.

He kept holding onto that, all through the frenzied rush to the hospital. She was—Mina was—

_Alive._

 

 


	7. Stay.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Was that what she was doing now? Did people become stars before their eyes went dark and their souls faded out? Was she touching the fabric of gravity in her own little dip, burning and burning and throwing out as much heat and life as she could before her light went out forever?

Hot. So hot.

There were eternal black holes of silence and agonizing shards of sensation. There was no such thing as time anymore in their claustrophobic hell-hole of a prison, and in her precious moments of clarity Mina began to realize that her consciousness was spending less and less time inside of it. Sometimes she woke up enough for the mat to torture her more, but as she grew less responsive he turned his attentions to Eren with increasing frequency. If Mina had had more energy, she would have been concerned, tried to do something. As it was, she couldn't even remember her name half the time anymore.

* * *

 

One moment she hazily blinked eyes open to  _him_  stroking her hair— _don't touch me don't TOUCH ME—_ and fretting about his "little Jenny" not doing well. From a distance Eren's hoarse voice was commanding her to fight while she had this chance.

 _I'm sorry. I'm sorry Eren, I'm sorry..._  She didn't have the strength left to say the words aloud.

* * *

 

Burning. So much fire. Was it around her? Or in her? It felt like it was everywhere...

Mina wondered whether she looked like a blazing star. Comets were very beautiful, shooting across the sky, but they were so cold. There was nothing alive about a frozen ball of ice and elements hurtling through space. But a star...a star burned so hot and so bright. It was universally accepted as beautiful, whether large or small, because it still gave off the heat and light that every living thing craved. And if stars had to burn out in the end, well...they had burned so hot while they lived.

Was that what she was doing now? Did people become stars before their eyes went dark and their souls faded out? Was she touching the fabric of gravity in her own little dip, burning and burning and throwing out as much heat and life as she could before her light went out forever?

* * *

 

It wasn't such a bad thing to burn alive, she thought. Lonely, though, to burn and burn and burn in silence. It would be nice to burn faster. One fast, hot burn, like on the space ships as they headed back from trips to the moon, and then it was over. She wished her body would just let go and run out of things to burn. Just stop and give in to the flames. But somehow she couldn't quite find the off switch to Neverland—

Dying wasn't so bad, really; just a long, slow walk into darkness. 

Had she heard that somewhere before, long ago and far away in a life she didn't remember anymore? 

* * *

 

Light. Shapes. Chaos in snapshot seconds. The world was moving. No, she was. How? Still hot. So hot. And pain. Every movement was pain, everything on fire. Silent. Black. Silent. Was this the afterlife?

If this was the afterlife, Mina wanted a refund. It  _sucked_. 

* * *

 

Burning. Nerves screaming. Touches, pressure, tension—could a person be ripped in half on a molecular level? Wind? Air, icy cold on her flames. Touches. Moving again. Her eyes cracked open to painful light and it was too much. Darkness.

Everything hurt, everything was on fire. Everything screamed for attention. Was she breathing? Mina didn't think she was. Pressure, on her chest, on her face. Pain. Nothing.

 _End,_  her last few wisps of spirit begged.  _End it end it end it end it finish. Let go._

Finally, sweet, blissful nothing. The nothing that had teased her in dreams, been hinted at by her imagined fantasies of oblivion when she had to find some way to stay sane in that living hell. Nothing was everything she'd wanted, the only thing she'd longed for and dreamed about for an eternity.

Finally there was

nothing—

* * *

 

She let go. She let go and something caught, something pulled her in, but she had let go and she wasn’t going back now. She’d made her choice and she’d gotten her wish. She wasn’t going back.

* * *

 

Time was coming back slowly. There were days, and days upon days, passing now, she knew.

She wasn't alive. She wasn't dead, either. Her body was a shell, laying still and looking like death and being forced to breathe in and out and in and out and her heart wasn't given a choice to beat or not. She couldn't connect herself to that body she saw. She couldn't make a bridge to get back. There was no connection between her and that broken, fragile shell on the sheets. It wasn't her. She didn't look like that, and she didn't look dead. Mina was herself. She couldn't touch in the state she was in, but she was awake. She didn't need that body. Doctors flung around words like  _induced coma_  and  _high_ _fever_ and  _infection_ , but Mina didn't care. None of that mattered anymore. It wasn't really her they were talking about anymore.

 

She was just stuck there, stuck looking down as a ghost, watching these people she knew have their hearts ripped out as they were told terrible news again and again, and there was always the boy sitting with her, always touching her hand.

She knew that boy. She knew him. But she was too tired, too disconnected. She couldn't remember.

There was a life, she told Eren once as they sat together invisible to the world, where she loved that boy, she thought. She couldn't remember his name, she didn't know him anymore, but she thought she loved him once.

Armin, Eren told her. His name was Armin.

Armin. Mina whispered the name to herself when she was alone in the dark room at night, surrounded by cold air and machines and masked visitors at regular intervals.

Armin.

I loved him once. 

Armin.

* * *

 

Eren wandered, too, sometimes, though not as much as Mina. He had more to tie him down. Mikasa, he said, and his parents. He couldn’t leave his mom when she was there, which was most of the time.

Mina looked into his room sometimes when he wasn’t out in the halls, watching Eren watch his family watch his body, which wasn't actually Eren, who was sitting right there watching them. It was weird and sweet in a tragic way.

* * *

 

Marco never left his room. His family never left him alone more than at night when no one was allowed to be in there. And more than his family, Jean was there more than Mina would have guessed was possible. When Jean would cry, Marco would hold him and brush at the tears and keep telling him over and over that it was okay, that he was okay, that it was okay. But Marco was a ghost. Ghosts couldn't touch.

When Jean would fall asleep, though, as close as the living could get to being dead, then he would feel Marco's touch sometimes. When she saw how Jean's shoulders would relax as he slept, as Marco held him tight and let him know he was still there, Mina almost wanted to try that with the boy who stayed so long with her. To give him that assurance.

But she wasn't there anymore. She was here. She hadn't stayed. 

* * *

 

Mina had made her choice. She'd let go, she'd left. They were holding her back in chains made of wires and tubes.

 _If I Stay,_ she'd remembered. That was a book she'd read years ago. Funnily enough, the girl had been in almost the same situation. But in the end, she'd chosen to stay.

Mina didn't touch Armin because she knew there was no point. It would only be cruel to him.

She hadn't stayed.

She was already gone.

* * *

 

Erwin, she knew. He sat beside Hange's body, a stoic sentinel with badly-masked worry. He was a good friend and a good brother, Mina thought. He'd gone to visit her body, too. So had Mike. Mina had left when Mike stepped in. Her tears were shed in the privacy of one of the dead hospital gardens.

The world in winter was fitting for all of them, Mina had told herself while she wandered through all the dead and dormant gardens. Everything was dead or dying, but some of it was stuck. Stuck in a limbo of waiting, not knowing when they would wake up again and come alive with the warmth and light of spring. Whose winter would end first?

Hange's boyfriend, Levi. He was with her all the time. Mina heard him telling Hange's body that he'd dropped college for the semester—it wasn't like he was getting anything done anyway. She was too important. 

Mina wished she could help Hange make him see that she was right there, that she could see him and hear him and she loved him. She loved him she loved him she loved him and he'd finally said that to her the other day when Erwin wasn't there and he let himself cry a little and whisper her the truth that for some reason his idiot self had never told her before. 

 _I love you too_ Hange told him over and over and over again.  _I love you too._

* * *

 

Marco wakes up first. There's a lot of crying, and a lot of hugging. He spends days learning to adjust to feeling his missing arm and lower leg. He had known, of course, he knew, he'd seen. But it was entirely different  _knowing_ and  _feeling_ the loss.

Jean and his family were there to help as much as they could, and the doctors had him moving and eating and trying to get strong again.

Marco was determined to live, and Mina was proud of him. 

* * *

 

Eren woke up next, full of fire and spitting mad. Had they really expected anything less? Armin left Mina for a while then, to go be with his best friend. He didn't know that he hadn't left her though, since she was there in Eren's room with him.

Eren was ready to talk to the police within a day or two. He told them everything he could remember, and once Eren started talking, Marco was able to start as well. Mina didn't hang around for their statements and conversations. She didn't need to relive all of that.

Eren was having trouble thinking clearly, much more than was normal. He'd be okay for a while, but then he'd start struggling, and the more he tried the worse it would get until he gave in and slept. He'd been drugged a lot, apparently. The man hadn't known what he was doing, and it was going to take Eren's brain a while to recover the right chemical balances. That meant a lot of therapy and a lot of medication experimentation and a lot of annoyance on Eren's part. It made mina happy to see Eren being his old self, passionate and so full of life and feeling. He wasn't the same, he didn't have as much control, but deep down she knew it was still Eren, and he would get better.

It would just take time.

* * *

 

Hange woke up and couldn't speak. Everyone had known, they'd been warned, and Hange had felt it happen to herself. But Hange was  _Hange._ She was passionate and thoughtful and she always had so much to say, so many ideas to communicate and everyone was so used to hearing her constantly explaining and talking that the new silence was unsettling.

When Hange woke up, Mina was in the room by complete coincidence. Levi had immediately pulled Hange into a tight, desperate embrace and mumbled I love you I love you I love you into her ear and Hange tried to say it back but  _nothing happened_ and the looks of surprise and then devestation that crossed Hange's face in that moment were a sight that Mina was never going to forget.

It was the first time she had ever seen Hange cry.

Erwin brought Hange a Laptop that same afternoon, and they had paper and pens for her and Levi refused to let her not try. 

You're going to talk again, he said firmly. You're going to speak again. Until you do, I'm not letting you just curl up and sulk. You're still you, and you can still communicate other ways. So communicate.

The first thing Hange typed was "Of all the people I could fall in love with, it had to be the aggressively persistent clean freak."

Levi paused in his daily clorox-cleaning of the room's surfaces to read the screen when she shoved it towards him, and Hange's smile came back for the first time in months when he actually laughed.

* * *

 

Mina didn't choose to wake up. They made her.

New drugs flowed through the IV and pulled her back into the body on the bed—which, admittedly, was in much better shape.

When she couldn't fight it anymore, she finally opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was Armin.

Armin. I loved him. He's stayed here and not given up and he's waited for me this whole time.

The least she could do, after everything he'd been through for her, was choose to live now that she'd been forced back into it. The least she could do was give him a smile and say hello. She tried, but nothing seemed to happen. Armin responded, though, eyes instantly tearing up as he smiled a little. His lips formed words that mina couldn't hear—

that mina couldn't hear—

that she couldn't—

she couldn't hear _she couldn't hear._

* * *

 

In a reverse of Hange, they had to type and write things and then show Mina so she could read them. It was harder without her glasses, and she was able to say that to them somehow. Within minutes, Armin had somehow produced her old glasses and gently settled them on her face. She said a grateful thank you that she hoped came out right.

The untreated fever and infection had caused it, the doctors told her. It wasn't brain damage, luckily. It was within her ears that the problem lay. So hopefully—here Armin squeezed her hand—it was only temporary. Hange could get new vocal cords, Mina typed back. Were they able to replace what was wrong with her ears?

No, one of the nicest-looking nurses typed. But her ears could heal on their own, if things went well. In the meantime, they could work with writing and sign language.

* * *

 

 _I want to hear your music,_ Mina wrote in the notebook Armin gave her. _I want to hear you play._ Armin looked up at her.  _I know I can't,_ Mina said.  _But I want to. I haven't heard any music for_ so _long._

Armin lifted her hand and kissed it before walking out of the room. She was afraid she'd upset him and he wouldn't be back. As she watched the hands on the clock move further around, she got more worried—maybe he didn't want to come back. Maybe something had happened to him. Had he been kidnapped too? No—

But he came back finally, panting and out of breath. He had a black violin case with him. 

 _You can't hear it the normal way,_ he quickly scrawled on the notebook sheet,  _but I can still give you music._

As the sun dipped below the ledge of her hospital window, Mina cried a little as Armin sat beside her and played his violin, guiding her hand to rest on the body of the violin and feel its vibrations in their patterns, to his neck to feel it move as he sang.

If she closed her eyes, it felt like a little piece of home.

 

 


	8. Interludes and In-Betweens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time passed, as it will. It felt like everything that had happened had ripped the whole world apart into a thousand little pieces, turned everything upside down, and thrown it into a food processor on high without any chance of hitting an off button.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is unedited and the result of me typing anything that came into my head these past few days while I've been feeling bad, so I apologize in advance for bad writing and/or confusing trains of thought.

Time passed, as it will. Armin marveled, in the quiet moments, at how it seemed to go so slowly sometimes that he could swear it scraped sluggishly over his skin, but at the same time suddenly he was raising his head and months had passed. And in the same way, it was strange to see what had stayed the same and what had changed.

It felt like everything that had happened had ripped the whole world apart into a thousand little pieces, turned everything upside down, and thrown it into a food processor on high without any chance of hitting an off button. They’d been flung onto a sharp-bladed carousel with no warning, and no one knew how to make it stop, apart from losing what fragile little grip they had left and fling off into oblivion.

Some of them had. But not all of them, Armin had to remind himself. Look at who was still here. Think about what you have. Think about who you have.

It was _hard_. The school year was coming to a close, and while they were all still scrambling to pick up any shreds of their old lives they could, the world had kept turning. Everyone who had been involved in the tragic events, no matter their role, had had their lives thrown into a different path while the rest of the people in the world just...lived on. They had been set apart by it all, and it was hard to remember that. The divide, that disconnect, was startling every time. When Armin went to school and got swept along in groups of students talking about ordinary, everyday young adult things—gossip, sports, forgotten papers, pop quizzes, relationships, food—he sometimes stopped in the middle of the hallway just trying to process it. It was so ordinary that the normality unsettled him.

While he spent his days wrapped up in a personal hurricane of finishing school with good grades and flying between friends who were trying to recover from nearly dying and doing everything he could think of to help Mina’s deafness be less devastating and Eren come out of his shell and Hange’s muteness be less of a hindrance and just generally be there for everyone while still actually doing things like _sleeping_ and _eating_ and _oh yeah you’re supposed to shower every now and then oops,_ he just...kept forgetting that other people didn’t deal with that.

He wasn’t angry or resentful that he had to. It was unfair, sure, but being angry wasn’t going to help. He couldn’t do anything to change what had happened; he could only try to help with the aftermath. When something traumatic happens in your life, life just seems to freeze for you and it’s like you’re on a different plane from most of the world. Sometimes, Armin wondered if it was possible to ever jump back into the right track, or if they would be stuck in this fuzzy slipstream forever.

* * *

Three months since the rescue, and everything was changing again. Marco, Eren, Hange, and Mina were all in different levels of recovery, and so were the people around them.

Eren, as it turned out, had been drugged. A lot. Since he was constantly belligerent, the kidnapper had decided it would be easier if Eren wasn’t all there—so the inexperienced and unqualified middle aged man had started drugging up an eighteen-year-old with heavy-duty tranquilizers.

It was a miracle Eren hadn’t died from an overdose, Grisha said not long after the rescue. As it was, Eren had one hell of a withdrawal to go to. Apparently, most of what Armin thought he knew about withdrawals was completely wrong. There were two stages: acute and post-acute.

Acute lasts a few weeks at most, and it’s a living hell. Luckily for everyone, Eren was in a coma for almost all of it. He managed to escape feeling the tremors, the nausea, the migraines and hallucinations and all kinds of unpleasant. He had two grand mal seizures, though, which nearly gave his mother a heart attack in the middle of the night. Armin silently thanked the universe that Eren hadn’t had a sudden heart attack as well.

Around the time Eren woke up, he was moving into the post-acute stage. Grisha’s explanation of what Eren had to expect had been memorable to say the least, since both father and son shared the same blunt and no-holding-back personality.

“You slept through the acute stage,” Grisha had said, “so you don’t have to deal with that anymore.”

“Awesome,” Eren deadpanned, scratching his nose and blinking up at the IV. “what don’t I want to know happened?”

“You can google it later, I’m not going to waste the time we have before you fall asleep again telling you that. Especially since it looks like you’re headed back to dreamland pretty fast,” his father added, eyeing Eren’s dipping eyelids.

Eren growled slightly and forced his eyes open, willpower sparking through. “I’ll stay awake long enough.”

“You’d better, because I don’t want to explain this twice. You’re heading into what’s called post-acute withdrawal syndrome—”  
“PAWS, right?” Armin was perched on the windowsill air vent, hanging out with Eren for a few hours.

“That’s often the shorthand term, yes,” Grisha nodded. “The second stage is made up of sporadic flare ups of lots of smaller but irritating symptoms, like insomnia, mood swings, exhaustion, anxiety, etc. It feels like being on a rollercoaster of symptoms. I hate to break it to you, Eren, but this is a long haul.”

“I can handle it,” Eren said confidently. “How long? Three months? Six?”

“More like two years.”

Jean later told Armin that he could hear Eren’s enthusiastic swearing from half a floor away in the bathroom. Grisha and Armin couldn’t help laughing, despite how bad they felt for Eren.

Armin paused his chuckles to catch Eren in a an awed gaze. “Eren, I didn’t know you knew how to curse in Sweedish.”

“And how in the world did you learn Ancient Greek?” Grisha asked.

Eren poked sullenly at a balloon. “How did _you?_ ”

Grisha grimaced and tipped his head in a _touche_ gesture. “Just don’t show off that particular talent around your mom, okay?” he said. “Or Mikasa. They’d yank your ear no matter how bad you’re feeling.”  
Armin still wasn’t sure whether Eren’s shivers were from the cool hospital temperatures, leftover from the withdrawal, or an automatic response to the memory of the Jaeger womens’ terrifying scoldings.

Since Grisha was a doctor himself, the hospital let Eren go sooner than any of the others, since he could get the same care at home once he was stable enough and had gotten some strength back.

* * *

Hange was always surrounded by her family—Erwin’s family, Levi, and Mike, to be precise. Erwin’s parents weren’t able to be around much, since they were high-profile government lawyers, but they did everything they could to make sure Hange was comfortable and well taken care of. Erwin was the best brother possible, blood related or not. He even managed to work out a system where Hange could do a minimum amount of work and pass her classes, helped along by the fact that Hange was a known genius.

Levi was there every day. He had dropped a few classes, saying he could always make them up later or just test out of them if he wanted to. Hange had tried to protest.

“I spent three damn months not even knowing if you were alive, and definitely never letting myself hope I could see you again,” he’d countered. “Now I’ve finally got you back, and I’m not wasting this. You’re more important than any dumb English 101 class, shitty-glasses. Worry about yourself. I’m fine.”

Hange was released second, after Eren, back to the support and safety of the Smith household. She had to come in for checkups regularly, of course, and also for some planning meetings with a researcher who happened to know a group at MIT that had recently developed the first synthetic vocal cords and were looking for some volunteers to test them out.

Hange, being Hange, had jumped right in line, and Levi was right beside her. As soon the school year ended in May, the Smiths were flying Hange, Levi, and Erwin out to Boston for an extended stay, where Hange would undergo a procedure to receive the vocal chords and hopefully regain her voice.

Mina wanted to know every detail of the situation, absorbing everything Hange could tell her. At first took turns typing back and forth over text, but within a few weeks both of the girls—along with Levi, Armin, and Erwin—were getting proficient enough in sign language that they could have conversations that way in person and over skype. Armin had asked why they chose that instead of any other method, and Mina had explained.

 _Hange can’t talk, but she can hear, she had signed. I can talk, but I can’t hear anymore. So I could talk to her and she could sign back, and we could do it that way, sure. But talking is hard for me now since I can’t hear myself. If I sign or type, I at least know that I’m getting the right words across. Plus since we have to use sign language so much anyway—especially with Dieter—we might as well. We’re in the habit now._  
Dieter was Mina and Hange’s therapist, specializing in working with blind, deaf, and mute patients who had been through traumatic experiences. As much as Mina hated having to go through counseling, she liked Dieter. When Armin had asked her recently how the sessions were going, Mina smiled a little before signing back, _They suck, but he doesn’t._

* * *

Marco had spent that time regaining strength, recovering from infections and—more recently—having surgery to clean up the ends of his limbs and make them suitable for prosthesis use.   
“You have to keep your goals in mind and hang onto that can-do attitude,” the surgeon said. “You do that, and you’ll go as far as you want to with some hard work.” Marco was young, and he was getting strong again. They measured him after a few weeks had passed since the last surgery, starting the fitting process. His father got ready to go with him to an inpatient rehabilitation facility a few hours away, where Marco would live as he regained his old strength and learned how to use—and then fine-tune—his prosthetic leg and arm.

He stayed cheerful and optimistic, and made the leaving easier for everyone. There were tearful goodbyes with Jean, of course, but with the promise of visits every weekend, and more often once graduation was over, they would be okay. Marco’s family was doing better too, his parents happier and the kids getting more of the attention they needed now that things weren’t so chaotic.  

* * *

Mina was stuck in the hospital longer than the others and definitely getting restless. Armin visited as much as he could, almost a permanent fixture himself at this point. Jean visited a lot, and Mike came too. It had been hard for a while, since Mina hadn’t been able to look at him without crying for the first couple of weeks she’d been awake, but she had eventually sorted it out. Mike didn’t blame her for anything, and he was a master at cheering people up. He was even better at playing card games. (And by card games, they meant poker and Uno tournaments. The nurses pretended not to notice the aggressive battles while slyly adding fruit gummies and quarters to the betting pools on their breaks.)

As the weeks passed, her deafness had remained. The doctors had tried steroid treatment as soon as it was safe, but since it was coming so long after the fact there wasn’t much hope of it working. They left her on the drugs for long enough that she developed side effects—even then she didn’t complain—but nothing changed. It was her cochleas, they said, and they had been wrong—the cochleas were already damaged before her infection had affected them. Her hearing had been severely damaged while captive. The infection and fever’s effects were just the crowning blow.

 _So there’s no hope,_ she had signed at the specialist who was informing her of the new information.

“We’ve initiated the process for you to get cochlear implants as soon as you can, probably in a few months. They could give you your hearing back—”

 _They don’t give you your hearing back,_ she had signed at the man. _I’m not stupid, I know how they work. They don’t give you normal hearing, it’s different. But they would let me hear again, in their own way, and I could work with that. Thank you for taking these first steps._

“You understand, Mina, that you have to relearn how to hear. It’s a long process, not even counting the surgery and activation stages.”

_I know. I do want it. But don’t I have to go through testing and a psych evaluation?_

“You already have, several times over,” her main doctor interjected. “And I think we can all agree that being able to hear again would be nothing but beneficial for you. You’re young and determined—the perfect candidate.”

 _What do you think?_ Mina had suddenly signed at Armin.

He signed back without hesitation. _If you’re willing, you should do it. And until you can hear again, I’ll be here to help you feel and see what you can’t hear._

And he had. He was her ears, figuring out ways for her to hear music and setting her up with subtitles and sound-to-text software wherever it was possible to use them. Mina told him one evening while they marathoned Pirates of the Carribean for the umpteenth time that while it wasn’t exactly the same as hearing, she was indescribably grateful for what he always did for her. You help me remember why it’s worth living, that I still can, she had told him. You make me feel like it can be okay.

Okay. Not perfect, but okay. “Okay” was infinitely more than either of them had expected to get. They could work with that.

Mina had definitely needed to be in the hospital longer than the others, after legitimately dying twice since she’d been rescued. Her infections had left her barely alive and with a lot of recovering to do. But she’d followed instructions and responded well to the antibiotics. She’d been gaining back weight, doing physical therapy to get her muscles stronger, and going to counseling sessions. But she was still stuck in the hospital because of complicated social services tie ups.

As far as Armin could figure, because Mina had been tangled up in a missing person situation and no one actually officially had custody of her anymore, social services couldn’t just put her in a home but they also couldn’t just toss her at someone. And legally, somehow the police were the ones who had custody of her. But that clearly wasn’t going to work. The hospital couldn’t keep her forever, and while she definitely had a lot of appointments with specialists and Dieter, she was taking up a bed she didn’t need.

“What if she went to live with you as temporary custody, at least?” Armin asked Grisha while they were both getting coffee in the cafeteria one evening. Armin would have

“Carla and I have talked about it, and Eren has suggested that as well. We’d be willing to do it, but it all depends on what the authorities say and when signatures can be obtained. The number of people these decisions have to go through…”

“I know,” Armin groaned, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes. “It’s ridiculous. There has to be a simpler way than—”

“What is it?”

“Mina’s birthday. It was February 15th.”

“Is she—”

“She turned 18 finally. She’s a legal adult, she’s out of the system.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Armin said. “We can have them look at her records. I guess everyone was so concerned with keeping her alive at that point that no one ever bothered to put two and two together.”

“If you’re right about this, Armin, that will make everything so much easier.”

“I am,” Armin said confidently.

* * *

He was.

Mina was now eighteen, and within three days had signed herself out of the hospital and into an extended stay with the Jaegers. She had resisted the idea at first because she knew they already had Eren and they were busy with their lives and had enough to deal with as it was. Eren himself came in and talked to her, along with his mother, and there was really no resisting those two once they were determined to get their way about something.

While Armin and Mina were sitting in the hospital lobby waiting for the Jaegers to pull the car up to the doors, a little boy wandered over and asked why they were using their hands in such strange ways.

“Are you talking?” he asked, is small eyebrows furrowed. Mina was getting better at lip reading, but she still wasn’t good at it and the boy had talked fast. Armin translated for her in sign language. She smiled at the little boy and opened her mouth.

“Yes,” she said carefully. A glance at a nodding Armin confirmed that she’d gotten it right. She continued on with a bit more confidence. “Something happened to—to my ears, and—” she halted, losing her footing. “Since I can’t hear any—any—anymore—”

Mina gave up. Now that she couldn’t hear herself, she had to think about talking after her brain had processed the fact that it couldn’t hear the first few syllables that were supposed to be coming out of her mouth. And when she thought about talking, it got incredibly difficult. Like when you consciously realized you were breathing, and then you got stuck having to regulate it yourself for a bit until something distracted you enough for it to become subconscious again. She would get caught on how her mouth was supposed to form the shapes of the sounds, what letters were rolling off her tongue and how she could tell, if she was too loud or quiet or had weird inflections—she didn’t even know if the sounds she was making were coherent.

So Mina, like with the other times she’d tried to speak, gave up. She signed the rest of what she was trying to say. Armin’s sharp eyes watched her hands carefully as he translated for the boy.

“She’s saying that since she can’t hear anymore, it makes it really hard to talk out loud, and it’s easier for her to speak by writing out what she’s trying to say or using sign language. Sign language is the easiest, since it lets her see what other people are saying, too.”

“Like how you two were just talking?”  
“Exactly.” Armin smiled.

What’s your name? Mina signed. Armin translated.

“Evan.”

Do you want to see how it’s spelled in sign language?

“Really?”

Mina nodded and quickly flashed the proper finger positions for E-V-A-N.

“That was your name,” Armin said.

“Awesome!” Evan was twitching, grinning, body taut with the energy of little kids. A hand came down on his shoulder.   
“Evan? What are you doing?” A woman had come up behind him.

“Mom, look, they talk with their hands!” Evan was tugging on his mother’s arm, trying to get her to watch Mina and Armin signing at each other.

“Oh? That’s—oh my goodness,” she broke off in a whisper, eyes locked on Mina’s face. “Aren’t you—you’re one of those teenagers. They’ve shown your pictures all over.”

Mina looked like a cornered deer.

The woman clutched Evan to her and started pulling him away. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for everything you’ve had to go through, I can’t even imagine—I’m sorry he bothered you—”

“No,” Mina barked out, “he was fine—” her voice was coming out wrong, she knew it was coming out wrong, the woman’s face, that look, she knew—she couldn’t speak right, she wasn’t normal anymore, she couldn’t even sit in one damn lobby without the whole world knowing she was different now—

Armin’s lips were moving as he pulled her off the bench; saying gracious goodbyes to the lady, probably, assuring her that her son had been fine. He always spoke so smoothly, always so right no matter who he was talking to. Mina’s own breaths were coming tight, short, not enough air. Cold. Hot. Tears pricking at the edges of her vision.

Mina was falling in silence—  
Silence—

There was no escape from the silence it was always there and no one could help there was nothing around it was empty and silent and silent and _silent_

* * *

The valet’s timing with the car had been perfect, and Armin only drove to the other side of the parking lot before throwing his car into park and shoving Mina’s red, tear-streaked face into his shoulder. He rubbed circles all over her back and didn’t touch her hair. He tapped her hand to get her attention and traced out a breathing box on his thigh. Mina started trying to imitate him through her wet gasps.

“It’ll be okay,” he whispered to the back of her hunched shoulders, even though he knew she couldn’t hear. “This will be okay. We’ll be okay. We’ll work through this.”

* * *

Their drive to the Jaegers was silent, of course. Everything was, now.

For Mina, because her hearing had been stolen. For Armin, because Mina had. There were a million and one things they’d wanted to say to each other and a million and one more that they should but somehow, after all of this time, they still hadn’t started.

They sat in the driveway, in the dark, in the silence, and Armin decided that they needed to try. A dubstep mix CD went in the slot, the volume was cranked up, and his finger hit play. Mina’s head snapped up as the bass flowed into her skin, gave her a rhythym that was a little like sound, and Armin took her shoulders in his hands and hugged her properly for the first time in seven months. He didn’t expect her to, since she had issues with physical contact now, but she did; she hugged him back. And in the dark car on that silent street they began to say the things through their soft touch that they never could with their voices.


End file.
